John Waters
The nightlife in Baltimore is very mixed. Any gay people I know go to the hipster bars; they don't go to the gay bars. Start your night at the Club Charles, and then you can meet people to go other places. The Charles has been Baltimore's favourite cool hipster bar forever.
People looked at my early pictures and called them the most disgusting things ever, and now 'Hairspray' is being done at every school in Britain and America.
Fellini was a little lofty for a teenage boy, but certainly he was a huge influence.
If I made a film today, it would certainly be on digital.
Do I like how digital films look? Sometimes, but sometimes it looks flat, and ugly.
It's still possible to make movies. Not so much on YouTube. On YouTube, you wind up with an advertising career. What movie became infamous and a hit because of YouTube? Maybe there is one. I don't know.
Bergman movies were the most influential. They used to show at Goucher University, which was where my parents used to live. 'Brink of Life' was the first one I ever saw. Three pregnant women in a maternity ward and their misery - I love that. That is what I want to show at my funeral.
Science fiction is something I never understood.
Grade school ruined reading for me by demanding book reports for such snore-a-thons as Benjamin Franklin's biography written for children.
I never got along in school, really - I already knew what I wanted to do. I have never in my life got a paycheck from anywhere in the world that asked if I went to school.
I used to run away to New York from Baltimore all the time. I would get on the Greyhound bus and tell my parents I was going to some sorority weekend... I'd even make up fake permission slips, come to New York, and just ask people on the street if I could stay with them and go see midnight movies.
I want to be commercial. I'm never the person who says, 'I don't care if people don't see my movies.' I always want people to see my movies.
New York was scarier than Baltimore ever was. It was terrible in the '70s. I'm glad they cleaned it up. I got mugged; I had to go to the hospital. Every time you went out, you got robbed. It was horrible. You can't imagine.
I like to cook for myself or others, so I cook. I always read at night. Sometimes I go to the movies. I don't go out wildly during the week.
The few movies I can even think of that I watch over and over would be the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton movie 'Boom!', 'Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!', and 'Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.' I wouldn't call any of them mainstream.
My early films look terrible! I didn't know what I was doing. I learned when I was doing it. I never went to film school.
I'd be arrested if I still smoked because I'm the one who would be changing the battery in the airplane in the lavatory to take out the smoke detector. I would've been those people they warn you against.
My mother was Catholic, my father not. I went to Catholic high school. Every form of education failed me. I was trouble.
I was creating characters early. People didn't beat me up. I scared them. I hated authority. I could also get people to do things; I was quite the early director. I could make people laugh enough to get their defences down - and then brainwash them.
My dad saw 'A Dirty Shame.' I felt bad about my father knowing what 'felching' was.
I don't like reality TV. I don't want to look down on people.
I grew up in Baltimore, which is, you know, a city of extremes certainly, but my parents were very conservative. But they made me feel safe, and even though they were mortified at what I was doing, they encouraged it. I think because they thought, what else could I do?
I wanted to own a junk yard as a child, you know. I used to smash cars and think, 'Oh, my God, there's been an accident.' My mother would take me to junk yards, and I look back on that and I think, 'Wow, that was really loving.'
When I was young, there were bars called the 'Hungry Hole,' and in those same neighbourhoods are now gay people pushing baby carriages.
I'd be a bad father. I'm too self-involved.
The good guys in my movies mind their own business, and they don't judge other people. And the bad guys are jealous; they judge other people without knowing the whole story. They want all the attention, and they're mean spirited.
In any film business, if you're trying to get your next film made, you would never say, 'Oh, my last film was a cult film.' I'd say, 'Oh, great, well I hope this one isn't!' I always say to Johnny Knoxville, 'How do you do it? You sort of do the same thing we did, except you made millions, and I made hundreds.'
I'm sick of '60s nostalgia. I've been to clubs in New York where it's just like the Fillmore East. And I thought I hated that then.
Around '62 in Baltimore, all the girls had those big hairdos. And then suddenly, a few of the really hip ones started doing their hair straight. And people panicked. And it was called going 'Joe,' meaning Joe College. And people would say, 'I don't know. Should I be 'Joe'? I can't decide.'
Good actors, actually, in real life, are shy and very quiet people a lot of the time.
In sixth grade, I went to a very good private school, and I did learn there. I learned how to read and write. If I had quit school in sixth grade, I would know as much as I know today and would have made one more movie. By the time I got to college, I was so bored and angry.
There are schools for weird children now. There wasn't when I was young.
I remember when I first went to the Baltimore Museum of Art and I bought this little Moreau print in the gift shop. I took it home, and I was, like, 12 years old or something.
By wrecking something, it's always reinventing. All modern movements in art and music wrecked what came before, in a way - and surprised the cooler generation that was one step ahead. That's how you get ahead.
I do take a one-week vacation every year, and I go to London in the fall.
My dreams have come true. I mean, everything I wanted to happen as a kid has already happened.
When I first saw 'House on Haunted Hill' as a kid in Baltimore, and the skeleton went out on the wire, and the thousand kids in the audience went crazy... My whole life, I've tried to at least equal that cinema anarchy. I came close with the end of 'Pink Flamingos,' but I didn't tie with it.
If I'm seeing a three-hour foreign film, I don't want to watch it in a bed.
On airplanes, strangers confide in me the most deepest, darkest secrets. And I think they think I'll understand. And I generally do understand.
I've taught in prison; I've counseled people... I've been arrested; I've been to the psychiatrist.
I wrote about Herschell in my book 'Shock Value,' for which I interviewed him. We became friends; I had dinner with Herschell the last year before he died. He was elderly, but his mind was perfectly intact.
'Serial Mom' tested really well when we finally got with the right audience. But they would go to some shopping mall in a deep, deep suburban L.A. neighborhood where they knew people would hate, and they just wanted to spend money to prove that people wouldn't like it. The movie was not a success when it came out.
Liberal censors are the worst. I don't remember any trouble with 'Serial Mom' or 'Cecil B. Demented' or any of them. Except 'Cry Baby.'
I always had a work ethic. And I think I very much got that from my father and my mother.
I think I'm probably the only person that, when the parents lent me money to make the movie, they wished I had not paid them back. They could have said 'No,' and it would have ended, and I would have gotten a real job.
In the beginning, my equipment, I would rent them from teamster-types, really. I don't know where they got the cameras - I think from the TV stations. But I don't know if they asked the TV stations.
Who have I been starstruck by in real life? One of the weirdest ones was, when we were making 'Cry-Baby,' David Nelson from 'The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet.' I couldn't believe he was sitting in my living room. Certainly Patricia Hearst. Tab Hunter. A lot of the stars I've worked with, when I first got them.
Always, European art cinema has been the most threatening and the grimmest and the most transgressive, I think.
Putting out compilation records, buying the right to music is incredibly complicated. You have to find the writer of the song and the publisher of the song - not the singer - and make two separate deals.